Knowledge Solutions

The volume of research greatly exceeds its application in practice. Researchers must pay greater attention to the production of their research findings in a flexible range of formats in recognition of the varied needs of consumers.

Partnerships have a crucial role to play in the development agenda. To reach the critical mass required to reduce poverty, there must be more concerted effort, greater collaboration, alignment of inputs, and a leveraging of resources and effort. Understanding the drivers of success and the drivers of failure helps efforts to create and run them.

Scenario building enables managers to invent and then consider in depth several varied stories of equally plausible futures. They can then make strategic decisions that will be sound for all plausible futures. No matter what future takes place, one is more likely to be ready for and influential in it if one has thought seriously about scenarios. Scenario planningScenario planning challenges mental models about the world and lifts the blinders that limit our creativity and resourcefulness.

Knowledge audits help organizations identify their knowledge-based assets and develop strategies to manage them.

The sustainable livelihoods approach improves understanding of the livelihoods of the poor. It organizes the factors that constrain or enhance livelihood opportunities, and shows how they relate. It can help plan development activities and assess the contribution that existing activities have made to sustaining livelihoods.

Development is about people—it is about how they relate to one another and their environment, and how they learn in doing so. Outcome mapping puts people and learning first and accepts unexpected change as a source of innovation. It shifts the focus from changes in state, viz, reduced poverty, to changes in behaviors, relationships, actions, and activities.

Culture theory strengthens the expectation that markets work, not because they are comprised of autonomous individuals who are free of social sanctions but because they are powered by social beings and their distinctive ideas, beliefs, values, and knowledge. It can contribute to understanding and promoting development where group relationships predominate and individualism is tempered.

The Most Significant Change technique helps monitor and evaluate the performance of projects and programs. It involves the collection and systematic participatory interpretation of stories of significant change emanating from the field level—stories about who did what, when, and why, and the reasons why the event was important. It does not employ quantitative indicators.

Power no longer resides exclusively (if at all) in states, institutions, or large corporations. It is located in the networks that structure society. Social network analysis seeks to understand networks and their participants and has two main focuses: the actors and the relationships between them in a specific social context.

The gulf between the ideal type of a learning organization and the state of affairs in typical bilateral and multilateral development agencies remains huge. Defining roadblocks, however numerous they may be, is half the battle to removing them—it might make them part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

Learning is the key to success—some would even say survival—in today’s organizations. Knowledge should be continuously enriched through both internal and external learning. For this to happen, it is necessary to support and energize organization, people, knowledge, and technology for learning.

The conditions of economic and social progress include participation, democratic processes, and the location of necessarily diverse organizational setups at community, national, regional, and increasingly global levels. Access to and judicious use of information underpins all these.

Knowledge from evaluations will not be used effectively if the specific organizational context, knowledge, and relationships of evaluation agencies, and the external environment they face, are not dealt with in an integrated and coherent manner. Knowledge management can shed light on this and related initiatives can catalyze and facilitate identification, creation, storage, sharing, and use of lessons.

Despite worldwide attention to strategic planning, the notion of strategic practice is surprisingly new. To draw a strategy is relatively easy but to execute it is difficult—strategy is both a macro and a micro phenomenon that depends on synchronization. One should systematically review, evaluate, prioritize, sequence, manage, redirect, and if necessary even cancel strategic initiatives.

Strategic reversals are quite commonly failures of execution. In many cases, a strategy is abandoned out of impatience or because of pressure for an instant payoff before it has had a chance to take root and yield results. Or its focal point is allowed to drift over time. To navigate a strategy, one must maintain a balance between strategizing and learning modes of thinking.

Marketing in the public sector may be the final frontier. Agencies operating in the public domain can use a custom blend of the four Ps—product (or service), place, price, and promotion—as well as other marketing techniques to transform their communications with stakeholders, improve their performance, and demonstrate a positive return on the resources they are endowed with.

Social marketing is the use of marketing principles and techniques to effect behavioral change. It is a concept, process, and application for understanding who people are, what they desire, and then organizing the creation, communication, and delivery of products and services to meet their desires as well as the needs of society, and solve serious social problems.

The need for twenty-first century mindsets and protocols has sparked interest in design thinking. That is a human-centered, prototype-driven process for the exploration of new ideas that can be applied to operations, products, services, strategies, and even management.

The need for twenty first century mindsets and protocols has sparked interest in design thinking. That is a human-centered, prototype-driven process for the exploration of new ideas that can be applied to operations, products, services, strategies, and even management.

Intellectual capital has become the one indispensable asset of organizations. Managing its human, relational, and structural components is of the essence of modern business.

Political economy embraces the complex political nature of decision-making to investigate how power and authority affect economic choices in a society. Political economy analysis offers no quick fixes but leads to smarter engagement.

Assumptions that do not associate with probabilities create a false sense of certainty. Working backward, considering alternatives that emerge from failed assumptions broadens the scope of scenarios examined. The Premortem technique raises awareness of possibilities, including their likely consequences, to enrich planning.

To enlist commitment, organizations depend on a clear and powerful image of the future. Future Search conferencing has emerged as a system-wide strategic planning tool enabling diverse and potentially conflicting groups to find common ground for constructive action.

A theory of change is a purposeful model of how an initiative—such as a policy, a strategy, a program, or a project—contributes through a chain of early and intermediate outcomes to the intended result. Theories of change help navigate the complexity of social change.

Organizations must be resilient if they are to survive and thrive in turbulent times. Learning from experience, investments in leadership and culture, networks, and change readiness can help them move from denial and paralysis to acceptance and practical solutions.

Strategic efforts to effect change are constantly challenged by emerging forces about which there is little advance knowledge. For constructive action, it is useful to look at the past to gain a perspective on the present; but, it is even more profitable to revisit past visions of the future from an interpretation of the present. The concepts of change over time, context, causality, contingency, and complexity help make sense.

The design and monitoring framework is a logic model for objectives-oriented planning that structures the main elements in a project, highlighting linkages between intended inputs, planned activities, and expected results.

A knowledge worker is someone who is employed because of his or her knowledge of a subject matter, rather than ability to perform manual labor. They perform best when empowered to make the most of their deepest skills.

The need to ensure that scarce funding is applied to effective projects is a goal shared by all. Focusing on common parameters of project performance is a means to that end.

Knowledge management is getting the right knowledge to the right people at the right time, and helping them (with incentives) to apply it in ways that strive to improve organizational performance.

Everyone sees things differently—knowledge often lies in the eye of the beholder. The reframing matrix enables different perspectives to be generated and used in managementManagement techniques processes. It expands the number of options for solving a problem.

When confronted with a problem, have you ever stopped and asked “why” five times? The Five Whys technique is a simple but powerful way to troubleshoot problems by exploring cause-and-effect relationships.

Ideas are not often plucked out of thin air. The SCAMPER brainstorming technique uses a set of directed questions to resolve a problem (or meet an opportunity). It can also turn a tired idea into something new and different.

Meetings bring people together to discuss a predetermined topic. However, too many are poorly planned and managed, and therefore fail to satisfy objectives when they do not simply waste time. The operating expenses of time wasted include related meeting expenditures, salaries, and opportunity costs.

Management by walking around emphasizes the importance of interpersonal contact, open appreciationAppreciation, and recognition. It is one of the most important ways to build civility and performance in the workplace.

In the twenty-first century, managers are responsible for the application and performance of knowledge at task, team, and individual levels. Their accountability is absolute and cannot be relinquished. In a changing world, successful organizations spend more time, integrity, and brainpower on selecting them than on anything else.

Emotional intelligence describes ability, capacity, skill, or self-perceived ability to identify, assess, and manage the emotions of one’s self, of others, and of groups. The theory is enjoying considerable support in the literature and has had successful applications in many domains.

Organizations must become information-based: (i) knowledge workers are not amenable to command and control; (ii) in the face of unremitting competition, it is vital to systematize innovation and entrepreneurship; (iii) in a knowledge-based economy, it is imperative to decide what information one needs to conduct one’s affairs.

In development agencies, paradigms of linear causality condition need much thinking and practice. They encourage command-and-control hierarchies, centralize decision-making, and dampen creativity and innovation. Globalization demands that organizations see our turbulent world as a collection of evolving ecosystems. To survive and flourish they must then be adaptable and fleet-footed. Notions of complexity offer a wealth of insights and guidance to twenty-first century organizations that strive to do so.

Culture guides the way individuals groups in an organization interact with one another with parties outside it. It is the premier competitive advantage of high-performance organizations. Sadly, for others, organizational culture is the most difficult attribute to change: it outlives founders, leaders, managers, products, services, well-nigh the rest. It is best improved by organizational learning for change.

Organizational learning is the ability of an organization to gain insight and understanding from experience through experimentation, observation, analysis, and a willingness to examine successes and failures. There are two key notions: organizations learn through individuals who act as agents for them; at the same time, individual learning in organizations is facilitated or constrained by its learning system.

When embarking on a change initiative, one should rapidly implement change that results in the higher levels of performance that were envisioned when the decision to make the changes was made. To make this happen, organizations must first overcome the resistance to change and then secure as much discretionary effort as possible.

Branding is a means to identify a company’s products or services, differentiate them from those of others, and create and maintain an image that encourages confidence among clients, audiences, and partners. Until the mid-1990s, brand management—based on the 4Ps of product (or service), place, price, and promotion—aimed to engineer additional value from single brands. The idea of organizational branding has since developed, with implications for behavior and behavioral change, and is making inroads into the public sector too.

Talent is not a rare commodity—people are talented in many ways: it is simply rarely released. To make talent happen organizations must give it strategic and holistic attention.

Gary Hamel defines management innovation as a marked departure from traditional management principles, processes, and practices (or a departure from customary organizational forms that significantly alters the way the work of management is performed). He deems it the prime driver of sustainable competitive advantage in the twenty-first century.

Managing for results requires a coherent framework for strategic planning, management, and communications based on continuous learning and accountability. Results frameworks improve management effectiveness by defining realistic expected results, monitoring progress toward their achievement, integrating lessons into decisions, and reporting on performance.

In the age of competence, one must learn before, during, and after the event. Knowledge solutions lie in the areas of strategy development, management techniques, collaboration mechanisms, knowledge sharing and learning, and knowledge capture and storage.

Interest in performance measurement grows daily but the state of the art leaves much to be desired. To promote performance leadership, one must examine both its shortcomings and its pernicious effects.

Surveys present clear and mounting evidence that staff engagement correlates closely with individual, collective, and corporate performance. It denotes the extent to which organizations gain commitment from personnel.

Organizations once distinguished themselves by their systems and procedures. They now need distinctive ideas about their objectives, their clients, what their clients value, their results, and their plans. For that, they need top talent.

It is a given that organizational change affects people. It is people, not processes or technology, who embrace or not a situation and carry out or neglect corresponding actions. People will help build what they create.

Good corporate governance helps an organization achieve its objectives; poor corporate governance can speed its decline or demise. Never before has the glare of the spotlight focused so much on boards of directors. Corporate governance has emerged from obscurity and become a mainstream topic.

Micromanagement is mismanagement. What is it that one should decide in the higher echelons of an organization that, given the same data and information, personnel in the lower echelons might not run just as well?

Newly minted approaches to corporate reputation are already obsolete. Beyond gaining control of issues, crises, and corporate social responsibility, organizations need to reconceptualize and manage reputation in knowledge-based economies.

Moral courage is the strength to use ethical principles to do what one believes is right even though the result may not be to everyone’s liking or could occasion personal loss. In organizations, some of the hardest decisions have ethical stakes: it is everyday moral courage that sets an organization and its members apart.

Who is your customer? What does the customer value? How do you deliver value to customers at an appropriate cost? Business models that focus on the who, what, and how to clarify managerial choices and their consequences underpin the operations of successful organizations.

Projects ought to be vehicles for both practical benefits and organizational learning. However, if an organization is designed for the long term, a project exists only for its duration. Project-based organizations face an awkward dilemma: the project-centric nature of their work makes knowledge management, hence learning, difficult.

Culture must not be seen as something that merely reflects an organization’s social reality: rather, it is an integral part of the process by which that reality is constructed. Knowledge management initiatives, per se, are not culture change projects; but, if culture stands in the way of what an organization needs to do, they must somehow impact.

Innovation is something that is new, capable of being implemented, and has a beneficial impact. It is not an event or activity; it is a concept, process, practice, and capability that defines successful organizations. Innovation in the public sector can help create value for society.

Decision-making is a stream of inquiry, not an event. Decision-driven organizations design and manage it as such: they match decision-making styles to appropriate techniques and, wherever possible, encourage parties to play roles rife with dissent and debate; decision rights are part of the design.

Communities of practice are groups of like-minded, interacting people who filter, amplify, invest and provide, convene, build, and learn and facilitate to ensure more effective creation and sharing of knowledge in their domain.

Action learning is a structured method that enables small groups to work regularly and collectively on complicated problems, take action, and learn as individuals and as a team while doing so.

Appreciative inquiry is the process of facilitating positive change in organizations. Its basic assumption is uncomplicated: every organization has something that works well. Appreciative inquiry is therefore an exciting generative approach to organizational development. At a higher level, it is also a way of being and seeing.

Cooperative work by a team can produce remarkable results. The challenge is to move from the realm of the possible to the realm of practice.

Mind maps are a visual means that represent, link, and arrange concepts, themes, or tasks, with connections usually extending radially from a central topic. They are used by individuals and groups (informally and intuitively) to generate, visualize, structure, and classify these.

Wikis are websites that invite voluntary contributions to organize information. They harness the power of collaborative minds to innovate faster, cocreate, and cut costs. They are now serious business.

The difference between poor and effective teams lies not so much in their collective mental equipment but in how well they use their abilities to think together. The Six Thinking Hats technique helps actualize the thinking potential of teams.

Virtual team management is the ability to organize and coordinate with effect a group whose members are not in the same location or time zone, and may not even work for the organization. The predictor of success is—as always—clarity of purpose. But group participation in achieving that is more than ever important to compensate for lost context. Virtual team management requires deeper understanding of people, process, and technology, and recognition that trust is a more limiting factor compared with face-to-face interactions.

Workplace dynamics make a significant difference to people and the organizations they sustain. High-performance organizations earn, develop, and retain trust for superior results.

Theories of leadership are divided: some underscore the primacy of personal qualities; others stress that systems are all-important. Both interpretations are correct: a larger pool of leaders is desirable all the time (and superleaders are necessary on occasion) but its development must be part of systemic invigoration of leadership in organizations.

Strategic alliances that bring organizations together promise unique opportunities for partners. The reality is often otherwise. Successful strategic alliances manage the partnership, not just the agreement, for collaborative advantage. Above all, they also pay attention to learning priorities in alliance evolution.

Servant leadership is now in the vocabulary of enlightened leadership. It is a practical, altruistic philosophy that supports people who choose to serve first, and then lead, as a way of expanding service to individuals and organizations. The sense of civil community that it advocates and engenders can facilitate and smooth successful and principled change.

The prevailing view of leadership is that it is concentrated or focused. In organizations, this makes it an input to business processes and performance—dependent on the attributes, behaviors, experience, knowledge, skills, and potential of the individuals chosen to impact these. The theory of distributed leadership thinks it best considered as an outcome. Leadership is defined by what one does, not who one is. Leadership at all levels matters and must be drawn from, not just be added to, individuals and groups in organizations.

Communities of practice have become an accepted part of organizational development. Learning organizations build and leverage them with effect. To reach their potential, much as other bodies, they stand to gain from healthy reporting. Quality of information and its proper presentation enable stakeholders to make sound and reasonable assessments of performance, and take appropriate action.

Necessity is the mother of invention. The demand for good ideas, put into practice, that meet pressing unmet needs and improve people’s lives is growing on a par with the agenda of the twenty-first century. In a shrinking world, social innovation at requisite institutional levels can do much to foster smart, sustainable globalization.

Corporate values articulate what guides an organization’s behavior and decision making. They can boost innovation, productivity, and credibility, and help deliver thereby sustainable competitive advantage. However, a look at typical statements of corporate values suggests much work remains to be done before organizations draw real benefits from them.

To develop and deliver products and services, large organizations rely on teams. Yet, the defining characteristics of these often hamper collaboration among different parts of the organization. The root cause is conflict: it must be accepted then actively managed. Promoting effective cross-functional teams demands that an enabling environment be built for that.

The human mind is driven by an emergent array of biological, cognitive, and social properties. Unconscious processes perform feats we thought required intention, deliberation, and conscious awareness. The breakthroughs of social neuroscience are fostering more comprehensive theories of the mechanisms that underlie human behavior.

In most types of organizations, formal authority is located at the top as part of an exchange against fairly explicit expectations. In networked, pluralistic organizations that must rapidly formulate adaptive solutions in an increasingly complex world, its power is eroding as its functions become less clear. In the twenty-first century, the requirements of organizational speed demand investments in informal authority.

With decreasing bureaucracy and decentralization of operations, the span of knowledge coordination should be as close as possible to relevant knowledge domains. Coordinating mediums, or knowledge managers, have key roles to play.

The act of delegating calls for and rests on trust. In organizations, delegation had better be understood as a web of tacit governance arrangements across quasi-boundaries rather than the execution of tasks with definable boundaries.

Surveys are used to find promising opportunities for improvement; identify, create a consensus about, and act on issues to be addressed; record a baseline from which progress can be measured; motivate change efforts; and provide two-way communication between stakeholders. Healthy communities of practice leverage survey instruments to mature into influence structures that demand or are asked to assume influential roles in their host organizations.

Complex adaptive systems are the source of much intra-organizational conflict that will not be managed, let alone resolved. To foster learning, adaptation, and evolution in the workplace, organizations should capitalize on its functions and dysfunctions with mindfulness, improvisation, and reconfiguration.

To manage organizations in ways that will make our society manageable, we need to spark innovations in management. Consider the organization in which you work. What configuration does it have and what does that tell you? What might you do to enhance the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of its structure?

Hierarchy, market, and network forms of organization are not mutually exclusive: in the twenty-first century, the need for resilience, intelligence, speed, and flexibility demands that each organizational form finds requisite expression in individual organizations.

With information and communication technology, civil society plays an increasing role in governance, promoting transparency and accountability to tackle corruption. Development agencies can strengthen civil society-led, ICT-driven anticorruption initiatives by funding projects and programs that foster institutional environments conducive to participation in public affairs, promote cooperation and mobilization, and develop capacities.

Peer assists are events that bring individuals together to share their experiences, insights, and knowledge on an identified challenge or problem. They also promote collective learningCollective learning and develop networks among those invited.

Organizational learning calls for nonstop assessment of performance—its successes and failures. This makes sure that learning takes place and supports continuous improvement. After-action reviews and retrospects are a tool that facilitates assessments; they enable this by bringing together a team to discuss an activity or project openly and honestly.

Many people write too much, bureaucratically, and obscurely. Using plain English will save time in writing, make writing far easier, and improve understanding.

Dissemination is an indispensable means of maximizing the impact of research. It is an intrinsic element of all good research practice that promotes the profile of research institutions and strengthens their capacities. The challenge is to ensure the physical availability of research material and to make it intelligible to those who access it.

Storytelling is the use of stories or narratives as a communication tool to value, share, and capitalize on the knowledge of individuals.

Good practice is a process or methodology that has been shown to be effective in one part of the organization and might be effective in another too.

A retreat is a meeting designed and organized to facilitate the ability of a group to step back from day-to-day activities for a period of concentrated discussion, dialogue, and strategic thinking about their organization’s future or specific issues. Organizations will reap full benefits if they follow basic rules.

Simple planning and a little discipline can turn an ordinary presentation into a lively and engaging event.

Organizational boundaries have been stretched, morphed, and redesigned to a degree unimaginable 10 years ago. Networks of practice have come of age. The learning organization pays attention to their forms and functions, evolves principles of engagement, circumscribes and promotes success factors, and monitors and evaluates performance with knowledge performance metrics.

Organizational learning is still seeking a theory and there can be no (and perhaps cannot be) agreement on the dimensions of the learning organization. However, useful models associated with learning and change can be leveraged individually or in association to reflect on the overall system of an organization.

Dissemination is the interactive process of communicating knowledge to target audiences so that it may be used to lead to change. The challenge is to improve the accessibility of desired knowledge products by those they are intended to reach. This means ensuring physical availability of the product to as large a proportion of the target audience as possible and making the product comprehensible to those who receive it.

Evaluation serves two main purposes: accountability and learning. Development agencies have tended to prioritize the first, and given responsibility for that to centralized units. But evaluation for learning is the area where observers find the greatest need today and tomorrow.

The insights, attitudes, and skills that equip managers for their various responsibilities come from many sources outside formal education or training. To identify areas for improvement, it is first necessary to identify what these responsibilities are.

Questioning is a vital tool of human thought and interactional life. Since questions serve a range of functions, depending on the context of the interaction, the art and science of questioning lies in knowing what question to ask when.

Coaching and mentoring can inspire and empower employees, build commitment, increase productivity, grow talentTalent, and promote success. They are now essential elements of modern managerial practice. However, many companies still have not established related schemes. By not doing so, they also fail to capitalize on the experience and knowledge seasoned personnel can pass on.

Creativity plays a critical role in the innovation process, and innovation that markets value is a creator and sustainer of performance and change. In organizations, stimulants and obstacles to creativity drive or impede enterprise.

Despite competing demands, modern organizations should not forget that learning is the best way to meet the challenges of the time. Learning charters demonstrate commitment: they are a touchstone against which provision and practice can be tested and a waymark with which to guide, monitor, and evaluate progress. It is difficult to argue that what learning charters advocate is not worth striving for.

Success is a process and failure on the way is an opportunity. Successful individuals and organizations fail well.

Social media is revolutionizing the way we live, learn, work, and play. Elements of the private sector have begun to thrive on opportunities to forge, build, and deepen relationships. Some are transforming their organizational structures and opening their corporate ecosystems in consequence. The public sector is a relative newcomer. It too can drive stakeholder involvement and satisfaction.

The failure of researchers to link evidence to policy and practice produces evidence that no one uses, impedes innovation, and leads to mediocre or even detrimental development policies. To help improve the definition, design, and implementation of policy research, researchers should adopt a strategic outcome-oriented approach.

Many work arrangements discourage learning. In organizations, classroom instruction is obviously not the most efficient method. However, if e-learning is to justify the publicity that surrounds it, there is a great need to understand its organizational environment and to evolve design principles.

How can we gauge the successes and failures of collective learning? How can the rest of the organization benefit from the experience? Learning histories surface the thinking, experiments, and arguments of actors who engaged in organizational change.

The true value of a conference lies in its effects on participants. Conferences are to generate and share knowledge that impacts behavior and links to results: this will not happen if the state of the art of conference evaluation remains immature and event planners do not shine a light on the conditions for learning outcomes.

In large organizations, knowledge can move rapidly or slowly, usefully or unproductively. Those who place faith in internal knowledge markets and online platforms to promote knowledge stocks and flows should understand how extrinsic incentives can crowd out intrinsic motivation.

Where large organizations make an effort to boost knowledge sharing, the solutions they fabricate can aggravate problems. Designing jobs for knowledge behaviors and recruiting people who are positive about sharing to start with will boost knowledge stocks and flows at low cost.

Communication is the process through which relationships are instituted, sustained, altered, or ended by increases or reductions in meaning. Belatedly, as the field of development englobes ever-wider realms, it is finally recognized as a driver of change. Sped by the Internet, strategic communications can explain activity and connect to purpose in more instrumental ways than have been considered so far.

Text is no longer the primary means of learning transfer. Character-based simulation, in which animated characters provide a social context that motivates learners, can improve cognition and recall and bodes well for high-impact e-learning.

In the age of the internet, many think libraries are being destroyed. One need not yield to pessimism: identifiable trends point to a promising future. In light of these, one should be able to circumscribe plausible scenarios. Approaches to strategic planning that count on ownership should make a big difference and point to desirable skills for librarians. If they also invest in resilience and give unequivocal attention to branding, libraries can enjoy a renaissance.

Exit interviews provide feedback on why employees leave, what they liked about their job, and where the organization needs improvement. They are most effective when data is compiled and tracked over time. The concept has been revisited as a tool to capture knowledge from leavers. Exit interviews can be a win–win situation: the organization retains a portion of the leaver’s knowledge and shares it; the departing employee articulates unique contributions and leaves a mark.

Feedback is the dynamic process of presenting and disseminating information to improve performance. Feedback mechanisms are increasingly being recognized as key elements of learning before, during, and after. Monthly progress notes on project administrationProject administration, in which document accomplishments as well as bottlenecks, are prominent among these.

Feedback is the dynamic process of presenting and disseminating information to improve performance. Feedback mechanisms are increasingly being recognized as key elements of learning before, during, and after. Assessments by executing agencies of the effectiveness of assistance in capacity development are prominent among these.

Staff profile pages are dynamic, adaptive electronic directories that store information about the knowledge, skills, experience, and interests of people. They are a cornerstone of successful knowledge management and learning initiatives.

A weblog, in its various forms, is a web-based application on which dated entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video are posted. A weblog enables groups of people to discuss electronically areas of interest and to review different opinions and information surrounding a topic.

The knowledge management discipline can be cryptic. These Knowledge Solutions define its most common concepts in simple terms.

Information has become ubiquitous because producing, manipulating, and disseminating it is now cheap and easy. But perceptions of information overload have less to do with quantity than with the qualities by which knowledge is presented.

If 80% of knowledge is unwritten and largely unspoken, we first need to elicit that before we can articulate, share, and make wider use of it. Knowledge harvesting is one way to draw out and package tacit knowledge to help others adapt, personalize, and apply it; build organizational capacity; and preserve institutional memory.

Organizations are often challenged to identify and resolve workplace problems. The Critical Incident technique gives them a starting point and a process for advancing organizational development through learning experiences. It helps them study “what people do” in various situations.

Organizations spend millions of dollars on management systems without commensurate investments in the categorization needed to organize the information they rest on. Taxonomy work is strategic work: it enables efficient and interoperable retrieval and sharing of data, information, and knowledge by building needs and natural workflows in intuitive structures.

The quality of our lives depends on the quality of our thoughts. Critical thinking is the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it. Excellence in thought can be cultivated and fertilized with creativity.

Remembering times past stimulates the mind and helps give perspective and a sense of who we are. Social reminiscence is a gain in performance without practice.